Bitcoin ASIC in Chips-to-$ Race

CUPERTINO, Calif. – In eight short months, startup CoinTerra designed a 28nm ASIC that pushes the envelope in logic power density and shipped a system using four of them. Its tale is typical of the headlong race to hardware acceleration in the emerging bitcoin economy

Bitcoin is the most high profile of several emerging digital currencies founded on a set of mathematical formulas and open source software released in 2009. Its de-centralized economy is based on bitcoin mining, essentially clearing transactions that use an increasingly complex set of cryptographic puzzles based on the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.

The first bitcoin mining systems to crack the code of a puzzle get rewarded, sometimes to the tune of millions in virtual currency. Initially participants used standard PCs for bitcoin mining. But as transactions became increasingly complex the community moved to GPU and FPGA accelerators and -- since January 2013 -- to ASICs.

“The race is to build the highest performance yet most power efficient platform based on ASICs,” said Javed Barkatullah, CoinTerra’s lead ASIC designer in a talk at the Hot Chips event here.

The first ASICs for bitcoin mining emerged in January 2013. Source: CoinTerra

CoinTerra’s Goldstrike-1 chip packs 120 hash engines into a single chip made by Globalfoundries. The startup puts four chips in a 37.5mm2 FCBGA package and two packages on each of two boards in a single system. Each four-die chip package consumes a whopping 500W running at 1.05 GHz at 0.7V

The chips, which use no memory, are aimed at super-fast logic execution and thus guzzle power and generate lots of heat. The system uses off-the-shelf automotive cables to deliver 84 amps of current to each chip. Liquid cooling with glycol antifreeze typically used by computer game enthusiasts keeps the chips cool.

The “very high toggle rates of 80% on average” for the bitcoin algorithm drives the need for high power and liquid cooling, said Barkatullah.

Indeed, the puzzles – which must be completed within ten minutes -- are so complex “no single machine is guaranteed to solve one in its life time,” he said.

Bitcoin miners now form collaborative computing pools and share revenues they win based on the percentage of compute power each member contributes. The overall bitcoin network is estimated to consume about 150 MW.

In a sign of the speed of the bitcoin performance race, the TerraMiner system launched in January at $6,000 but now costs just $3,000. The price decline relates to the ever increase complexity of the bitcoin hash puzzles.

The greatest contribution of Bitcoin may not be the currency. Rather, it may be helping to evolve a new way of making chips that can crunch data in the most efficient way. Think of future servers being designed around the experiences of the Bitcoin miners.

The good news for Bitcoin is that one makes money in these systems and not necessarily on the currency itself. It is like the gold rush of the Bay area where men that sold shovels made fortune while the diggers for gold went pennyless. The kits to mine Bitcoin is where the money is right now.

I appreciate the CoinTerra design team for their effort. The bitcoin did a great job. I am wondered to see the chips without memories. I am thinking o join into their community, and it is a good opportuinity to $300 at this time. There are many essay writting service reviews in the market place, but all of them are not providing the quality services. Unfortunately, it's your own duty to select the best site for your own assignment. I am waiting to see some more haardware like this from them.